Farm bill talks moved into the final stretch Friday with House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas saying “we’re moving right down the path” toward a House-Senate conference report in January.

“Very optimistic, we’re closing in,” echoed Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) after an early morning session with Lucas. “There’s no question in my mind that we’ll be able to come together and have a farm bill that we can take action on in January.”

The two ranking members, Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) also attended the hour long session, which began at 8 a.m. The new confidence reflects a collective relief that new scores from the Congressional Budget Office will help the two sides reconcile differences over the commodity title.

“We’ve gotten scores back that look very good, very workable,” Stabenow told reporters. “It puts us in good shape.”

Lucas left open the possibility of another face-to-face meeting next week and it is known that legal questions regarding some of the proposed payment limits attached to the commodity title are still an open question in the talks.

“We have set aside time if necessary,” the House chairman said. ‘There are some issues that have to be sorted out by the lawyers and we’re going to discuss it. If we need to be together, I’ll be back from Oklahoma.”

But Friday’s upbeat tone signaled the focus is already shifting toward preparing other members of the House-Senate conference for votes during the week of Jan. 6 after the New Year’s holiday.

Few details have been released publicly by Lucas and Stabenow to date, and both are leery of saying too much before January and risking attacks over the recess. “Your mother wouldn’t let you open your Christmas present before Christmas morning,” Lucas joked, fending off questions from reporters.

That said the outlines are there for a five-year package that will include new savings from both the commodity and nutrition titles while expanding on crop insurance alternatives that have become an ever bigger part of the farm safety net.

After a recent skirmish, negotiators appear to have settled on a 24 million acre target for enrollment in the Conservation Reserve Program. And Stabenow is expected to get most of what she was seeking in attaching new conservation compliance rules to crop insurance — a priority for environmental and wildlife groups.

“I think we are going to have a really well-balanced bill,” she told POLITICO prior to the meeting. But she shied away from confirming any specifics.

Elsewhere, Stabenow is resisting the very deepest nutrition cuts proposed by Republicans in the House. But she has agreed to changes that would crack down on what many see as an abusive practice by states, which distribute token amounts of low income fuel assistance to food stamp households to help them gain higher benefits.

Under this practice, known as “heat-and-eat,” as little as $1 per year in fuel aid can be used to claim a higher utility deduction and leverage far more in monthly food stamp benefits, especially in high cost cities like New York. By insisting that the fuel aid be no less than $20, lawmakers hope to rein in such schemes and the CBO says the potential savings are as much as $8.7 billion over 10 years.

Beyond the dollars, negotiators are looking at proposals to create up to 10 pilot projects to test ideas about better training jobless food stamp beneficiaries to get them back into the workforce. Republicans have insisted on tougher work requirements, and the pilots or demonstration projects are described as a more bipartisan approach to test ideas on how best to proceed.

Inside the commodity title, tougher payment limits would be imposed on future subsidies and the system of direct cash payments to farmers — begun in 1996 — would end. Instead, producers would have a choice between a new revenue protection plan promoted by the Senate and a more traditional counter-cyclical program tied to target prices favored by the House.

To keep down costs and address trade concerns, these payments would still be made on same the base acres assigned to each farm — not the actual plantings. But all indications are — after the CBO scores came back — that producers will be able to reallocate crops within their base to better reflect their recent history.

Special accommodations must be made for millions of “orphaned” cotton base acres, no longer qualifying for the commodity programs. Equally important is the potential shift to corn and soybeans after the rapid growth of these plantings over the past decade.

This is well illustrated by data collected by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) at the University of Missouri.

FAPRI’s numbers show that the number of base vs. planted acres is about the same — between 258 million to 259 million acres. But corn is planting 13 percent or 11 million acres over its base. Soybeans are up 26.4 million acres or 53 percent above its base.

At the same time, wheat plantings are down 17.6 million acres below base, a 24 percent drop. Cotton, sorghum and rice have all dropped as well.

Not surprisingly, then, there is pressure on the farm bill negotiators to allow producers to reallocate acres in their base to reflect these changes. But a wholesale shift to corn has some risks too given market changes over the summer.

Indeed, CBO’s May baseline assumes average prices for a bushel of corn at $4.45 in 2014, $4.52 in 2015, and $4.54 in 2016. But in the real world, cash sales are already running this week near $4.13 per bushel — an eight percent difference.

If that pattern holds, the revenue protection program in the proposed conference report will almost certainly trigger subsidy payments, and the cost could prove higher than CBO is predicting — based on its earlier baseline.